Together in Rural Unity

News has broken that Anthem will stop offering health plans under the Affordable Care Act in nearly all of Nevada’s rural counties, specifically blaming the uncertainty caused by the Republican health care plan in the U.S. Senate.Roughly 8,000 rural Nevadans will lose their access to insurance, with no alternatives to buy a different plan on the exchange. Prominence also decided to pull out of the state’s exchange entirely.

From Stewart Boss, Nevada State Democratic Party spokesperson: “Nevada families are already feeling the harmful effects of the Republican health care agenda in Washington, and Senator Heller – who has voted 20 times to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act – is a major part of the problem. The uncertainty and instability caused by Dean Heller and Senate Republicans continuing their efforts to pass their toxic health care plan, combined with the GOP’s efforts to disrupt the exchanges, is now creating havoc in Nevada’s rural counties. The thousands of Nevadans who will lose their health care plans or lose access to health insurance through the exchange have Dean Heller and Donald Trump to blame for this turmoil.”

The President’s “election commission,” established to cover his allegations that millions of illegal voters prevented His Vulgarity from attaining triumph in the popular vote, is requesting voter roll data from all 50 states. Nevada is included in this list.

“On Wednesday, all 50 states were sent letters from Kris Kobach — vice chair for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — requesting information on voter fraud, election security and copies of every state’s voter roll data.

The letter asked state officials to deliver the data within two weeks, and says that all information turned over to the commission will be made public. The letter does not explain what the commission plans to do with voter roll data, which often includes the names, ages and addresses of registered voters. The commission also asked for information beyond what is typically contained in voter registration records, including Social Security numbers…

If the President of the US isn’t all that interested in how the Russians hacked and meddled in the 2016 election, voters and voting officials in the US should be, and this includes the state of Nevada. There are several layers to the issues, the voting itself and the processes which are elements of the total election system.

Voting Machine Vulnerability

The good news is that Nevada has a relatively robust voting system in place that is more difficult for a foreign power — read Russian operatives — to hack, the bad news is that the Sequoia (Dominion) system could still have some issues most related to “insider” attacks

“The software suffers from numerous programming errors, many of which have a high potential to introduce or exacerbate security weaknesses. These include buffer overﬂows, format string vulnerabilities, and type mismatch errors. In general, the software does not reﬂect defensive software engineering practices normally associated with…

In CBO’s assessment, Medicaid spending under the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 would be 26 percent lower in 2026 than it would be under the agency’s extended baseline, and the gap would widen to about 35 percent in 2036 (see figure below). Under CBO’s extended baseline, overall Medicaid spending would grow 5.1 percent per year during the next two decades, in part because prices for medical services would increase. Under this legislation, such spending would increase at a rate of 1.9 percent per year through 2026 and about 3.5 percent per year in the decade after that.

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation do not have an insurance coverage baseline beyond the coming decade and therefore are not able to quantify the legislation’s effect on insurance coverage over the longer term. However, the agencies expect that after 2026, enrollment in Medicaid would continue to fall relative to what would happen under the extended baseline.

On the basis of consultation with the budget committees, CBO’s just-released cost estimate for the bill measured the costs and savings relative to CBO’s March 2016 baseline projections, with adjustments for legislation that was enacted after that baseline was produced. For consistency, this longer-term analysis uses CBO’s extended baseline published in July 2016. CBO analyzed these longer-term effects at the request of the Ranking Members of the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.

Trump may have won the electoral college, but he lost the popular vote by a historic margin. That fact apparently insults his fragile ego to the effect that he’s now amplified his claims of voter fraud and formed a commission that will look for the equivalent of lightning repeatedly striking the same exact spot. Heading that commission will be Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach who championed an illegal voter suppression technique called “caging” and launched a program called Interstate Crosscheck to compare voter registration data across states and ferret out evidence of double voting. Crosscheck, in the 30 states that took up using it, flagged 7.2 million possible double registrants, no more than four have actually been charged with deliberate double registration or double voting. Very few actual cases of fraud being referred for prosecution.

A new investigation from Rolling Stone raises fresh concerns about Interstate Crosscheck, finding that its methodology has a built-in racial bias that puts people with African-American, Latino and Asian names at greater risk of being wrongly accused of double voting.

The Washington Post actually did a deep dive into the 2016 election looking for voter fraud:

We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud – which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn’t – during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud – the filing of fraudulent voter registration information. Those aren’t votes cast – and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.

The found a grand total of only four documented instances of voters attempted to cast fraudulent votes. Not four percent, literally four individuals — and most of them were Republican voters. There are no other documented cases of voter fraud in the entire country in 2016. These four represent 0.000002% of the ballots cast, and again, they weren’t actually included in any official tallies.

But for Trump, that’s just all “fake news” and he’s now formed his very own commission using taxpayer dollars to find that elusive voter fraud …. or is it to look for ways to suppress the vote nationwide to assure his re-election in 2020. And, Kris Kobach has now lobbed his first volley in that effort:

I thought Republicans were supposed to be “States’ Rights” advocates. This effort by President Trump through his minions Kris Kobach and AG Jeff Sessions looks like an attempt to federally take over our voting processes so as to make it easier to suppress the vote across the entire nation. Do you really want to give all your personal and voting information to the Republicans who just left a database of voter information wide-open and unprotected for any and all to see, including the Russians? If you read the letter above, he wants:

Your First and Last Name, including Middle Name and/or initials

Registration/Mailing Addresses

Your Date of Birth

Your Political Party

Your Last 4 digits of your Social Security Number

Your Voter history (elections voted in since 2006)

Your Voter Status (Active/Inactive/Cancelled)

Info whether you registered in some other state

Info regarding your military status

Info regarding whether you’re an overseas citizen

But it gets worse as he states: “Please be aware that any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public.” Wonderful! Are they planning to make it easy for hackers/criminals to use your personally identifiable information to commit identity theft as a means of voter intimidation and suppression?

Apparently Nevada’s Secretary of State has no problem with complying with the request, but will at least withhold Social Security Numbers, Driver’s License Numbers, DMV-ID Card Numbers and email addresses: